It is credible that he would have detailed knowledge of such matters, though Abdul Qadeer Fitrat has not provided evidence to substantiate them. Nonetheless, his credibility and high profile – not to mention the large sums of money involved (several hundred million dollars of loans are in the suspected fraud category) – means such allegations would normally prompt the international community to put the pressure on for a proper investigation.

However, the allegations swirl very close to President Hamid Karzai so there will be the temptation to turn a blind eye in order to preserve relations with him and the stability of the current government.

Turning a blind eye to corruption has in other countries consistently provided the political space for extremists to prosper by allowing them to claim that only they have clean hands. Let’s hope the same mistake is not made on this occasion.

He is besotted by his “three lovely boys” and is most proud “by a long shot” of the family life he has created with Miriam. They manage to lead a relatively normal life, “not in a bunker in Westminster”, and he tries to pick his children up from school and put them to bed at night at least two or three times a week.

He regrets that sometimes he doesn’t always get the balance right, which makes him “quite miserable” and unable to do his job properly. Sometimes he has to tell them white lies if he is stuck in a meeting. At home, in the evenings, he likes to read novels and says he “cries regularly to music.”

However, there’s also much of substance in the piece, including:

Clegg was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq and for that he earned many supporters. His backing of the “surge” and British forces’ continued presence in Afghan­istan is therefore surprising. There are rumours, which he denies, that he wanted to call for an immediate withdrawal of troops but that the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, an ex-marine, persuaded him not to.

“In a sense,” Clegg says, “we have brought our ambition to a much more realistic level. We’ve now got an exit date, which we didn’t have before, and a much better set of weapons on the ground. And crucially you’ve got the British government saying to [President Hamid] Karzai – who I had dinner with recently – this cannot be won militarily. Once you’re in that far and you’ve had that many people die and be maimed, I think it would be morally questionable to cut and run overnight.”

You can read the full interview with Nick Clegg here.

The result is a portrait of not only the countries he visited but also the breed that makes up war correspondents, with their bravery, their bravado and their desire to get the story and the footage even at great personal risk. The motivation for such story getting may often be as much ego as public service, but in the end the public benefits from people willing to take remarkable risks with their personal safety in the name of journalism.

The dangers he was willing to put himself through were caused in part by the relentless search for footage of fighting – the bang-bang stuff in his terminology. As I’ve commented on this focus before in the context of reporting the conflict in Afghanistan:

The big problem with such footage of frontline fighting dominating is that the situation in Afghanistan is about much more than only the frontline fighting. It is a wider military, economic, social, diplomatic and political issue.

So having reporting about Afghanistan in mainstream TV dominated by the kinetic stuff provided by journalists embedded on the front line for a couple of weeks is rather like trying to cover the economy by embedding Robert Peston in a Manchester McDonald’s for a fortnight.

That may be interesting; that may be illuminating; but as a way of finding out and reporting on whether the whole UK economy is going to continue recovering or suffer a double-dip recession it would be woefully inadequate on its own.

Moorcraft also talks of this problem, acknowledging how the hunt for bang-bang can distract from telling the real story, but he says,

TV depends upon pictures. No pictures, no story. The best stories involve drama, action, and often bang-bang. That is the nature of the beast. It is hard to record trends rather than events.

A taste of the book’s tone to come is given in the foreword which says, “I have few acknowledgements, mainly because most of the people I met in this line of work did everything they could to hinder, discourage or, occasionally, shoot me.”

His account brings back into the public light many of the forgotten by-ways of history, such as how close the Russians came to winning the guerilla war in Afghanistan before the US stepped in and provided Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen, undermining the crucial Soviet air superiority, or the impact of international financial markets in putting pressure on the apartheid government in South Africa in its final days, having an impact beyond that which government-sponsored sanctions could manage.

Towards the end, the book fades a little into a collection of short anecdotes, one after another thrown at the reader, rather than the longer, more analytical accounts in the book’s earlier stages, but all through it is an entertaining and educative read.

You can buy Paul Moorcraft’s Inside the Danger Zones: Travels to Arresting Places from Amazon.

We do not seek a perfect Afghanistan, but one able to maintain its own security and prevent the return of Al-Qaeda.

This is primarily a mission of national security.

We are neither colonisers nor occupiers.

We are there under United Nations Security Council endorsement and at the invitation of the Afghan Government.

We are not in Afghanistan to create a carbon copy of a western democracy, and we are not there to convert the people to western ways.

We seek the government of Afghanistan by the Afghans for the Afghans.

We insist only that it does not pose a threat to our security, our interests or those of our allies.

Neither a fully functioning democracy nor an end to corruption is necessary to meet those aims – and wisely so given that if those are the yardsticks for military intervention in a country, the UK would be militarily committed in dozens and dozens of countries around the world. Because of the more modest nature of the aims, Nick Harvey was able to repeat the pledge to withdraw British troops from combat within this Parliament:

Britain is clear that we will no longer have troops in a combat role by 2015, but we foresee an enduring role in the country as part of a wide relationship.

Harvey’s speech also highlighted how deeply intermingled Britain’s defence forces now are with other countries, well beyond the relations with the French which caught the news earlier this year:

British Prime Minister David Cameron said in his meeting with Lars Lokke Rasmussen in August: “our troops have fought together, have suffered together and sometimes, tragically, have died together.”

Over the last 20 years this has taken place first in the Balkans, then in Iraq and now in Afghanistan.

But we are also side by side fighting piracy off the Horn of Africa, under the NATO operation Ocean Shield.

We have a strong and active training, exercise and exchange programme.

We train together for Afghanistan and Denmark has air crew embedded in Joint Helicopter Command - and at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters co-ordinating the Afghan mission.

We conduct together a series of planned activity such as the annual JOINT WARRIOR exercise.

British personnel are embedded in your Defence Ministry, Army Operations Command, and Royal Navy and Royal Air Force pilots fly your Lynx, Merlin and F16.

Nick Harvey’s speech both started and ended with a strong emphasis on the need for countries to work together:

There is an old Danish proverb: “No one is rich enough to do without a neighbour.”

The English poet John Donne put the same sentiment this way: “No man is an island, entire of itself.  Every man is a piece of the continent”…

No nation – no matter how large, no matter how powerful, no matter how rich in resources – can hope to secure its national interests acting alone…

I am a Liberal Democrat.

We are the most internationalist and pragmatically pro-European party in Westminster.

We instinctively understand the need to work together with other nations - and we embrace interdependence.

This new British Government will look outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards.

What makes the film different from many others about Afghanistan post-2001 was illustrated by a comment from the director in a post-screening Q+A session. Carol Dysinger explained that, unlike many others making films of the conflicts in Afghanistan, she had first approach the Afghan government for permission to film rather than the US (or other) military forces.

It is the Afghan army that is at the centre of the film. The footage comes from five visits, each of two months, that the director made to the country. The length of these visits means she earned enough trust from many of those filmed to reveal more than superficial first impressions. Yet at the same time the film is deftly edited together with an economy of style that packs in numerous illuminating pointers to wider issues. It only takes 30 seconds of an American special forces officer pointing out in a meeting that he has a completely separate line of command from all the others in the room to throw a stark light on the tangled command structures: US special forces, US non-special forces, Italian, NATO and Afghani.

The film’s focus on Camp Victory and its key personalities means that direct fighting features only rarely in the film. That is not to sanitise the military conflict, but it means the film covers the wider and longer-term issues than the usual reports which are drawn like a magnet to cover the ‘kinetic stuff’, giving drama at the expense of understanding (a point I talked about back in September).

Through the personalities we see the successes and failures of attempts to build up the Afghan army and the tangled web of political, social and economic problems which influence those efforts. As the director recounted in the Q+A, one Afghani said to her when she was asking about how bribery and corruption could be tackled, “You call it corruption. We call it an economy”.

The film is low-key in its presentation, with little in the way of editing or music to force a message on a viewer. However, the regular cycle of US advisers leaving Camp Victory and burning their papers before departure leaves a symbolic message about the difference between those who can tidy up and move on and those who are left behind.

The book itself is similarly crisp, packing a wide-ranging history of Al Qaeda and its key figures into only 150 pages of moderate size print. It is penned by an ex-CIA man of thirty years service who was frequently closely involved with the figures and events painted in the book, but not so closely as to make the reader fear it is more a justification of his career than a fair account of events.

The book traces the birth, rise and then stuttering of Al Qaeda, which has lost its unmolested bases in Pakistan, antagonised former supporters in Iraq with its brutality and yet does not appear to be about to concede defeat any point soon.

Some of the book covers familiar terrain, such as in recounting the huge levels of mistaken knowledge amongst the American population where a belief in a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 has survived the discrediting of what little evidence was ever presented to try to make the claim. Riedel approvingly quotes ex-Senator Max Cleland saying, “Attacking Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbour”.

Riedel’s view is firmly that the Israel/Palestine dispute fuels much of the region’s terrorism directly or indirectly and that a peaceful settlement there is a necessary part of any plan to defeat terrorism in the region. Unlike others who have similarly looked at terrorism and sought to separate the violent extremists from mainstream Muslims, such as Robert Pape, Riedel does not extend his list of underlying contributory factors to include the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia. Yet the US presence there is often cited in public as one of the reasons for terrorism by Al Qaeda supporters and Pape’s study Dying to Win, which looks in detail at what makes people suicide bombers, places great weight on this factor.

Instead, Riedel gives as another contributing factor the disputes over Kashmir. He argues that the disputes between Pakistan and India, often made fraught and violent by the Kashmir question, explain Pakistan’s own role in frequently supporting terrorism and extremists. Faced with a large, well-armed neighbour, Pakistan has sought its own national security by wooing armed extreme Muslims for the unconventional military strength they could bring in a conflict with India and by backing extremists in Afghanistan in order to have an ally at its back in any possible conflict with India.

“Pakistan” is perhaps too simple a word to use to describe the complicated mix of military, security and political power bases and tensions in the country, which have at times seen opposition to the Taleban win out – as in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and more recently when the Taleban appeared to present a direct military threat to Pakistan’s cities.

Riedel places some of the blame for the state of Pakistan on others, in particular the American government for abandoning its interest in the country so quickly after the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan and so giving Pakistan the message that it could only secure its own future by looking to extremists. He is also very critical of the switch of American resources from Afghanistan to preparing to invade Iraq at a point at which, he contents, Al Qaeda was on the brink of major military defeat up against the Pakistan border.

The question of how close to capture Osama Bin Laden personally was at that moment has, and doubtless will continue to be, much debate. To a British reader it is striking how absent the issue is from assessment of Tony Blair’s record: where was he exercising influence on George W Bush to ensure that the job was finished in Afghanistan rather than neglected in favour of Iraq? The invasion of Iraq was not merely a mistake in its own right; it was also a mistake for what it meant in Afghanistan.

The power of Pakistan’s military and the deep entanglement of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) can only be resolved, Riedel argues, if peace in Kashmir and strong relations with India remove the underlying rationale for a strong armed state pulling in unconventional allies.

By contrast, Bangladesh – another smaller country with an at times uneasy relationship with India – is praised in the book: “Though desperately poor, it had made tremendous strides since breaking away from Pakistan in 1971 to alleviate its poverty and reduce illiteracy. Now [in 2000] headed by Shaika Hasina, a female prime minister and thus a rare commodity in the Islamic world, it was also a poster child for the microcredit concept developed by Clinton’s long-time friend Mohammed Yunus in his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Furthermore, the country did not support terrorism, did not seek to acquire weapons of mass destructions, and was not a threat to regional peace.”

Many positive mentions too are made of the commitment of Saudi authorities to tackling violent extremism. Incidents such as the despatch of Saudi commandos to Afghanistan to try to arrest Osama Bin Laden before 9/11 help explain why Western governments have so often been very cautious and reluctant in taking up the Saudi government’s own failings.

The book provides detailed portraits of four key Al Qaeda personalities – Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Abu Musaib al-Zarqawi, including the main doctrinal divisions within Islam, so highlighting how their own view of Islam is far from universal or accepted.

The book ends on an attempted positive note, a chapter titled “How to defeat Al Qaeda”, though with Riedel’s prescriptions so heavily dependent on the Palestine and Kashmir questions it is far from clear that they are likely to be met.

You can buy Bruce Riedel’s The Search for Al Qaeda from Amazon here.

Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events … Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they’re not even the most interesting stories in many cases.

As with this rest of his piece, it’s a thoughtful explanation of the problems science journalism runs into. However, this point is not simply one about science; it is about journalism more generally. It is the same issue in a different set of clothes as the one I talked about in The flaw in war reporting from Afghanistan,

“The kinetic stuff” (that is soldiers and shooting to you and me) dominates mainstream TV footage … Yet the big problem with such footage of frontline fighting dominating is that the situation in Afghanistan is about much more than only the frontline fighting. It is a wider military, economic, social, diplomatic and political issue.

So having reporting about Afghanistan in mainstream TV dominated by the kinetic stuff provided by journalists embedded on the front line for a couple of weeks is rather like trying to cover the economy by embedding Robert Peston in a Manchester McDonald’s for a fortnight.

The problem common to both examples, and many others, is that journalism prefers the event to the process.

The publication of a new research paper can be news. The accumulation of wisdom through many research papers is not. A military confrontation is news. The slow process of rebuilding a country is not. A famine in an African country is news. The growing success of the country’s agriculture in other years is not.

In each case, concentrating on the short-term and the dramatic (or at least what can be made to be dramatic) greatly distorts the overall picture, but those bigger trends and more slow moving events more naturally find their homes in books, not news bulletins.

Many have assumed that insurgents invariably win by simply holding out. This is incorrect. Historically, governments have won more often than insurgents in the long run. And even wars that seemed to be spiraling inexorably toward defeat, such as Colombia’s against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, have been turned around through reinvigorated will, refocused strategy, and additional resources applied consistently over time.

The conclusion the author draws for Afghanistan is:

The Taliban insurgency will not end until the myriad root causes driving average Pushtuns to join or support the Taliban are somehow addressed. That this complex web of causes dates back centuries, and has been exacerbated by 30 years of continuous conflict, only makes matters worse … Another solution, trying to rapidly stimulate economic growth, risks increasing just the kind of official corruption that is currently fueling much of the anti-government sentiment in the country.

Even if the root causes can be addressed, the gradual nature of government victories will be especially hard on U.S. and NATO policymakers. Even if they are able to turn the campaign around, they will face the challenge of maintaining domestic support for what may appear to be a never-ending war, even as the war might, in fact, be ending. Also, some of the deals with the Taliban that the Afghan government is negotiating may end the violence but appear unsavory to the West …

There can be no shortcuts; although it is possible to quickly defeat insurgents, dealing with root causes, a multitude of combatants, and havens will take time. And it will be expensive: the costs of such an effort are incalculable, since it is impossible to predict how long the violence in any insurgency will drag on.

Despite the sentiments expressed in that last paragraph, the conclusion from this is not necessarily that long-term NATO military deployments would be required (regardless of the political commitments from the countries with troops still in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan to pull them out). Instead, it is possible to sketch a future which involves moving away from the previous focus of success counting as a strong central government which has defeated its opponents to seeing success as featuring strong regional government and peace deals. Those can buy the time and space for the sort of long term success which the article otherwise sees as dependent on continued heavy military involvement.

Whichever route is taken, this very debate re-emphasises my previous point about how the concentration on the ‘kinetic stuff’ in much reporting misses the real stories of what is or is not happening.

To get this sort of footage of fighting on the frontlines, journalists sign up (and in fact pay up) to be embedded with the British military. The US and other countries follow similar arrangements. Embedding has had its controversies, particularly the fear that by living, sleeping, eating and going to the toilet with the military journalists can end up too close to them and lose their independence of mind; a variant of the Stockholm syndrome if you like.

Yet the big problem with such footage of frontline fighting dominating is that the situation in Afghanistan is about much more than only the frontline fighting. It is a wider military, economic, social, diplomatic and political issue.

So having reporting about Afghanistan in mainstream TV dominated by the kinetic stuff provided by journalists embedded on the front line for a couple of weeks is rather like trying to cover the economy by embedding Robert Peston in a Manchester McDonald’s for a fortnight.

That may be interesting; that may be illuminating; but as a way of finding out and reporting on whether the whole UK economy is going to continue recovering or suffer a double-dip recession it would be woefully inadequate on its own. The same lesson too should be applied more widely to reporting of Afghanistan.

If you have been following this series of posts, you’ll be familiar by now with the mix of statements in the families and children section: a strong showing of Liberal Democrat policies, some amenable Conservative policies and then a couple of tricky points.

So we have policies which would happily fit in a Liberal Democrat manifesto such as maintaining “the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020″, supporting “the provision of free nursery care for pre-school children”, a pledge to “encourage shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy – including the promotion of a system of flexible parental leave” and a promise to “review the criminal records and vetting and barring regime and scale it back to common sense levels”.

There are also policies with a more Conservative origin but welcome to Liberal Democrats such as, “we will publish serious case reviews, with identifying materials removed” – something both Lib Dem and Conservative MPs called for in the wake of the Baby P tragedy. Likewise the promise to “reform the administrations of tax credits to reduce fraud and overpayments” reflects the traditional Conservative emphasis on fraud but also reflects the concerns raised across parties of the problems that follow when demands for repayment of overpaid credits unexpectedly hit families.

David Cameron’s attacks on some advertising aimed at children is taken up in this section too, in a way that also reflects the issues raised in the Real Women Liberal Democrat policy paper: “We will crack down on irresponsible advertising and marketing, especially to children. We will alsk take steps to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood”.

Similarly, there are several proposed measures to help families, most of which fit happily with Lib Dem policies, including more use of mediation when couples break up, reviewing access rights for non-resident parents and grandparents and providing stable funding for relationship support services.

Sure Start is to continue but taken “back to its original purpose of early intervention” and ”we will bring forward plans to reduce the couple penalty in the tax credit system”.

The foreign affairs section is short, has some welcome broad principles and then has a rather curious mix of specifics. The commitment to work as a constructive member of NATO, the UN and other multilateral organisations is now pretty common across most political parties, even if it wasn’t back in the 1980s. The promise that “we will never condone the use of torture” combined with the subsequent decision to launch an inquiry into allegations that the secret services have colluded in torture continues the sprinkling of ethical foreign policy touches through the document. Afghanistan gets a vague mention about “our shared resolve” to support the military there and the importance of close relations with the US is mentioned as is support for a two-state solution in the Middle East. Reform of the UN Security Council is supported, with the idea of giving permanent seats to Japan, India, Germany, Brazil and Africa.

Then we have the slightly random: establishing a new special relationship with India (worthwhile, but why single out India?) and promoting stability in the Western Balkans (what about the rest of the Balkans; would an unstable east be ok? And indeed what about other unstable areas?).